Bringing it all back home: By shucking 18 oysters in two minutes on Saturday at the New Orleans Oyster Festival, Bayley Mowatt of Baton Rouge’s Jolie Pearl Oyster Bar brought home the oyster shucking title. Mowatt narrowly beat Gus Marshall of the Desire Oyster Bar at the Royal Sonesta in New Orleans, who shucked 17 oysters. Leo Price of Dickie Brennan’s Bourbon House in New Orleans shucked 16 oysters to take third place. They were among six finalists who competed at the festival, after advancing to the finals by winning a preliminary competition in New Orleans on Wednesday last week. See a photo of Mowatt being presented with a plaque for taking first place.
Drilling down to it: A Houston-based natural gas and oil company is focusing on building new wells and using horizontal drilling to develop what might be thousands of acres in northern Louisiana’s Lincoln Parish for natural gas and natural gas liquids. As The Advertiser reports, Memorial Resource Development Corp. has purchased or leased 71,000 net acres in the Terryville Field in and around Lincoln Parish, where it is operating as many as eight rigs, with plans for perhaps 10 more by the end of the year. And they’re still leasing land, mostly outside the parish seat of Ruston. “There’s a lot of money somewhere,” says Lincoln Parish Clerk of Court Linda Cook, whose office files paperwork related to land leases. “It doesn’t seem to be slowing down.” Read the full story.
On tap: The flow of money into oil has allowed U.S. companies to avoid liquidity problems and kept American crude production from falling sharply. As The Wall Street Journal reports, even though more than half of the rigs that were drilling new wells last September have been banished to storage yards, nearly 9.6 million barrels of oil a day were pumped across the country in mid-May—the highest level since 1970—according to the most recent federal data. Helped by a ready supply of money, the flow of oil from the U.S. could keep crude prices low for the remainder of 2015 and beyond. Read the full story (subscription may be required).
